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Scanner Apps Turn the Phone Into a Fax Machine

A few years ago I tried to use my fax machine. I hadn’t used it in months and it failed. I didn’t even think about replacing it.

Of course, during the one or two times each year when I actually needed to send a fax or scan a document or receipts, I almost regretted not buying a new machine.

Now even that shred of regret is a thing of the past. For the price you might pay to send a fax from the local copy shop, you can buy an app that scans documents, builds PDF files and exports them without all the hardware headaches.

In customer reviews on iTunes, critics point out that you can always take a photo of a page, print it out and spare yourself the added cost of a scanner app. But this overlooks an important feature of these apps — namely, they make a page of text more readable for printing or reviewing on a bigger computer screen.

If you were to photograph a page from a book, for instance, you would have to push the page completely flat in order to get an image you could read. Otherwise the text curves so much that it hinders easy reading. For professional use, such photos would fall far short.

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The TurboScan app for iPhone.

To get a sense of how these apps work, I would suggest trying a free app first. JotNot Scanner’s free app works like most of the others on the market, and of the free apps I tried, I liked it best.

The apps differentiate themselves primarily in the ease with which the image of a page, for instance, or words on a whiteboard can be tweaked. Other differences come in how the apps help in exporting the scans in different formats and to different online services like DropBox.

The scanning process is fairly consistent, regardless of the app. You take a photo of a page, preferably in good light. The software scans the image and lets you crop it before a version is created for sharing.

JotNot’s free and paid versions include an image stabilization feature that snaps the photo only when the phone is perfectly still, but my hands failed to meet this standard. I grew weary of waiting for the app to take the photo automatically, and as a result I struggled to get a snapshot that was completely free of blurry words.

Once the page was photographed, JotNot placed it into a frame with grid lines that I dragged across the image to orient the text horizontally.

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It worked nicely. The text lay flat on the screen and, even with a few slightly blurry words, it was easy to read. You can pinch and zoom the page to get a closer look at words and phrases, and if you are scanning batches of pages, JotNot lets you build a multipage document.

The free version of JotNot includes ads, which is both annoying and a waste of valuable space on an already small screen, but it is a good app for those who merely want to test out the category.

It is worth spending $2 for the Pro version, which provides added screen room and other important benefits — chief among them the ability to export images via e-mail to an Evernote account or DropBox.

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The JotNot Scanner Pro app for iPhone.

The only way to export a scan with the free version is to send it as a fax or print it — if, that is, you own a printer that connects to your device wirelessly. If you can export the document digitally, as with the Pro version, you can then retrieve it using a device that is wired to a printer.

TurboScan and JotNot Pro are highly rated by iTunes users, and I liked them both. For the money, though, I found TurboScan a little easier to use, and the printed images were noticeably lighter and more consistently clear. TurboScan’s text-alignment feature also required slightly fewer touches, and the app moved pages into my e-mail queue with fewer steps than JotNot Pro, which is valuable if you are scanning multiple pages from separate sources, where batch-scanning is less helpful.

Scanner Pro was also good, but in my tests its image quality was not as good as TurboScan’s, and some of the controls were placed so closely together that I often pressed the wrong button.

On Android, I preferred CamScanner. Its interface was intuitive, the image quality was good and documents flew to DropBox.

The free, advertising-supported version of the app allows users to scan 50 documents, with up to 10 pages per document, and it offers few exporting options, while the $5 version offers unlimited scans, more exporting options and no ads.

Scan to PDF’s controls were less precise than those of CamScanner, and the processing was slower, but exporting was fast and easy, the image quality was good and the app placed no limits on the number of available scans. Scan to PDF also put no limits on batch-based scans.

For occasional scanning needs, I’d choose Scan to PDF and leave CamScanner Pro to those whose lives are still too cluttered with dead trees.

A version of this article appears in print on February 2, 2012, on Page B8 of the New York edition with the headline: Scanner Apps Turn the Phone Into a Fax Machine. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe